About Me

Thursday, 13 February 2014

Laying Eggs For The Future

If it walks like a duck,
swims like a duck and quacks like a duck then you have a theoretical basis for
assuming that it may be a duck, unless, of course, it is politically
inconvenient to be linked to ducks or the things they do. Then the trick is to have a line to the
effect that it is something else and hope to have the media onside.

Most, if not almost all,
the crises, major debates and issues of the present conform to this basic
proposition. Nothing is as it seems,
there is always something else. We
wander lonely as a cloud and those are not daffodils, they are an exotic
species that just look like them. But it
is more like a fog and we are hurrying along a mountain path in a thick one.

So when situations move
towards the phase of becoming chaotic and difficult choices have to be made,
the chances of choosing the least worst option diminish. Possibly the risks of taking entirely the
wrong course increase rapidly. Once you
take the wrong turn at a critical juncture then all the ensuing turns will be
wrong.

It goes against the human
psyche to admit mistakes, for the most part, so even when things are evidently
wrong, we crash on regardless and persuade others to follow. On our mountain path in the fog sooner or
later there is a risk of walking off the cliff.

In the last decade or two
there have been many examples of leaders going over the edge, crying for the
led to follow them. Unluckily there are
now many of the led ignoring them and just wandering about regardless in the
hope of finding a right way of one kind or another. When many of them bump into each other they
resolve the differences either by fighting or some form of mutually destructive
behaviour.

The answer that many give
to the question what is to be done is to stand still or go back to an earlier
situation, although that situation is no better, we just think we know more
about it.

When economists and their
ilk talk about "equilibrium" this is a notion that there is a natural
balance. When political philosophers or
cultural theorists talk about society, it is one that did not really exist,
just one that historically they think did when it never did in reality.

When environmentalists
talk they have the idea that there was once some sort of past balance of nature
that can be reclaimed and enforced despite the slight technical problems, one
of which is the doubling of world population every fifty years.

Those who claim to be
futurists and predict how things will be can use only dodgy data of the present
or their imaginations. One lesson from
the past is that developments and event occurred that nobody might have
imagined what could follow.

As for the economics, it
is my thesis now that there is no such thing as an equilibrium, there never has
been and there never will be. Add to
that all our theories of society cannot work in the world that is to come. As for the environment we have no control
whatsoever about the future.